Emergent Design & Gall's Law: When Complex Coding Problems Dissolve Instead of Being Solved

I recently read an article by the main maintainer of InversifyJS describing the journey of rebuilding its dependency resolution algorithm . What caught my attention wasn't the performance improvements or the technical details. It was something much more familiar. As I was reading, I realized they were experiencing the exact same phenomenon I had experienced years ago while creating InversifyJS. It reminded me of something that, until now, I had never really put into words. The temptation to solve the hardest problem first Every engineer has experienced it. You're implementing a feature when you encounter a design problem that feels wrong. You know the current approach won't scale, and you know there must be a beautiful abstraction somewhere, so you stop writing code and start designing. Sometimes that's the right thing to do. Many times it isn't. While building InversifyJS, I eventually adopted a different habit. Whenever I found myself thinking, "This feels too complicated, and I can't find a simple, elegant solution right now," I decided to wait. Not because I ignored the problem, but because I didn't think I understood it well enough yet. Instead, I focused on features where I had a reasonable level of confidence. I kept improving the parts of the system that felt obvious, leaving the difficult problems untouched. At first, this almost felt irresponsible. Over time, it became one of the most valuable engineering lessons I have learned. The magic wasn't finding the solution The interesting part is that I rarely came back later with a better idea. Something stranger happened. Implementing those simpler features changed the system itself. New abstractions naturally appeared. Responsibilities became clearer. Concepts that previously seemed unrelated suddenly fit together. Eventually, I would return to the "hard" problem only to discover it wasn't hard anymore. Not because I had become smarter or because inspiration had struck overnight. The problem itself had changed